In September 2019, the icebreaker ‘RV Polarstern’ will spend the next year drifting through the Arctic Ocean, trapped in sea ice. The focus of the MOSAiC drift experiment lies in direct in situ observations of climate processes in the Arctic, which couple atmosphere, ocean, sea ice, and biogeochemical cycling of elements. This project will provide sequence data to study for the first time how microbial communities change over a complete seasonal cycle in the Arctic Ocean in terms of their diversity and gene activity. These results will be instrumental to study climate processes they drive.
Proposer: Thomas Mock, University of East Anglia (United Kingdom)
Proposal: The International Arctic Ice Drift Experiment MOSAiC: Seasonal changes of microbial communities across the Arctic Ocean